Easy Life

We are moved

2008-04-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

The blog you are trying to view has moved to this new location:
http://easy-life.sabza.org

Adsense Publishers: Publish a Privacy Policy Now

2008-03-06T11:02:00.001-08:00

Google recently updated Terms and Conditions for Adsense program policies. I usually don't spend much time reading these, but this time they announced something that got me worried.

We've also added some specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers' use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.

Well many thanks to Jenstar of Jensense, she immidiately responded with a detailed explaination of new terms and conditions. After that she shared a privacy policy that could be used by other publishers.

I created three pages for my three different blogs and made sure that the link to the privacy policy page is displayed clearly on all my pages. But since this blog is hosted on Blogger, I wasn't sure if I needed a privacy policy here. But then I thought that there is no harm adding one here aswell.

Privacy Policy

2008-03-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

Privacy Policy for Easy Life

The privacy of our visitors to Easy Life is important to us.

At Easy Life, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use visit Easy Life, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.

Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocal) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.

We also use third party advertisements on Easy Life to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

You can chose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Privacy Contact Information
If you have any questions, concerns, or comments about our privacy policy you may contact us using the information below:

By e-mail: privacy[at]sabza[dot]org
By Phone: +92 021 2215033

Video Editing with Windows Movie Maker

2008-02-25T05:01:00.000-08:00

This blog has moved to a new location. The post you are looking for is available on this new location. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Google Docs Explained in Paperworks

2008-01-17T08:28:00.000-08:00

I use Ubuntu Linux and I am not a huge fan of OpenOffice.org the office that comes with most Linux distributions. I find Google docs a lot more convenient and useful. The reasons are obvious.

It is way much easier to share documents with Google docs than with Open Office.
I don't have to worry about making back up of my documents when I am upgrading my system or installing some new exciting Linux distro.

I was curious to find out if there are any people using Google docs to write novels, thesis and other documents where you have to format lots of pages and it becomes difficult to maintain the consistency. I didn't find this information instead I found a very interesting video. Its called "Google Docs in Plain English". Common Craft is the company behind this video they made it for Google. Common Craft is a company consist of two people Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever. They make videos in a format they call Paperworks. You can look at more of their work on the Common Craft Show.

Automatically Shutdown Computer On a Scheduled Time

2008-01-15T06:28:00.000-08:00

This blog has moved to a new location and the post you are trying to view is available at this new location. Sorry for the inconvenience.

How-To manuals on every topic

2008-01-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

The web is so full of how to articles. But there is one place that you must know about. Its wikiHow, the how-to manual that everyone can read and write.

I was looking for some tips to clean my room quickly and I found the article on wikiHow - Clean your room in 10 minutes. There are so many articles about so many things, for example there is a how-to about making your bed, how to be popular in highschool, change a car engine, and How to be the favorite grandparent. wikiHow is a collaboration to build and share the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual.

How WikiHow works? WikiHow's about page explains the process in these words:

wikiHow is a wiki, which is a web site that anyone can write and anyone can edit. Any visitor to wikiHow can create a new page to write about how to do something. Once the page is submitted, any other visitor can edit, improve, or change the page. Over time, the quality of the page rises as many people make improvements. To see for yourself how pages improve, view this time lapse edit revision reel of an actual article. All changes on the site are displayed on "recent changes" and also in the "page history" of each specific article. wikiHow works because we trust our users to behave in a manner which helps others. As a result, our users quickly remove vandalism, nonsense, and material that is inappropriate for our how-to manual.

Ignoring the Pagerank

2007-05-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

Sometime ago I was crazily attempting to get a better pagerank on Google. Unfortunately despite all the links I was getting (I thought they were relevant links too), they were not enough for a better pagerank. I gave up the idea of improving page rank.

Now I had some free time, previously I spent this time in link exchange requests. Now I was free to use this time to write and pay attention on what other people are writing on the topics that interest me. I got closer to some bloggers who shared my interests.

Two months later I checked that I have a page rank of 5 for my ubuntu blog. What happened there is that some people who also wrote about Ubuntu linked some of my posts. One or may be two links and they added great value to my pagerank. Since I had already given up on the pagerank thing, I have decided that I will not pay any attention to the pagerank. I will try to focus on writing posts that are informative and useful for visitors of my blogs. Many of them are bloggers, every one is a blogger these days. Linkbacks will come along with the visitors and pagerank... Seriously why would I care about pagerank when I will have the visitors who are already looking for my content and who are already eager to share it with others.

Designing and Writing Better For the Web

2007-05-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Webcredible is a web usability and accessibility consultancy. Being a blogger, I have an interest in web usabitlity and thats why I am a subscriber of Webcredible monthly newsletter. This month's issue had a link to U.S. Government's usability website. This website has huge information about usability. I have seen this website many times before and have read their Writing for the Web article. Still the ideas presented in this article appear so fresh and new to me. It is a simple guide to teach you the ways to improve your web content.

While improving your content, you should also check out 'The seven deadly sins of web design'.

Open Office - How To Create Templates

2007-04-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

This blog has moved to a new location. The post you are trying to view is now available at this new location. Sorry for the inconvenience.

How to create Page Margins with Google Docs

2007-04-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

This blog has moved to a new location. The post you are trying to view is now available at this new location. Sorry for the inconvience.

Scope Changed

2007-04-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

At first I thought about starting a blog to discuss how I am trying to teach my brothers to use MS Office, Open Office, and other office applications. But I have changed my mind. Now I am going to blog about every thing that makes life easier for me. There will be tips about nearly every thing.

I am not quite sure what kind of tips I will be offering, but lets hope that we would find a pace on the way.

Why Open Office

2007-04-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

Why I am going to train my brothers with Open Office? First, I think that we should be able to work with both open and proprietary productivity tools. Secondly, I dislike MS Office.

My brothers have no such bias towards Microsoft. In fact, they love MS products. They think that Office 2000 is easier to use than Open Office. I do not argue them, Since I haven't used either of these suites to a point where I could say that one of them is more difficult. I don't blame my brothers for taking the MS side in this debate. In an environment where every one is using pirated Office XP every where, they think that Microsoft opens a world of opportunities to them. Who uses Open Office in Pakistan? They ask me and I can not answer this question.

Free MS Office tutorials

2007-04-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

Microsoft offers a free book In and Out of the Classroom with Microsoft Office 2000 Professional. This book has Office 2000 tutorials that introduce students to Microsoft Office 2000 and how to get the most out of it. These tutorials are quite comprehensive and would be a great start for our learning process. I have also found Florida Gulf Coast University's Office 2000 Tutorials. These tutorials are very basic. So I guess we will use Microsoft's tutorials as our text book for now.

Why we are using Office 2000? We can not afford to buy Office XP. Unlike most popular Linux distributions, Microsoft's windows XP doesn't come equipped with all the essential software that you would need.

What about Open Office, it runs on Windows? Yes and we will be working on Open Office as well. What we are going to do is to learn Ms Office, Open Office and Google Office all at once. For example lets say we learn to set page margins on MS Word, then we will learn how to do that in Open Office writer and then Google Docs.

Google is your friend

2007-04-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

I rely on Google to find the information from the web. During this whole learning process we would using Google to:

Find tutorials
Find Sample Documents
Find Templates
Find clip art
Interact with each other and people from all over the world to improve the process and learn from the experience of others.

Google is not only a search engine. It has a web based office suite with a word processor, spreadsheets, we can create web pages with Google pages, chat with friends using Google Talk, and there is so much more that we can not think about covering it all in this blog post. But you get the picture. We are going to use Google as our notebook, web office suit, hosting our work and interact with friends.

Introduction

2007-04-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

My brothers both like playing games on my computer. It is not like they are total idiots, they just don't have any experience of working with Microsoft Office and other tools that are commonly used in schools and offices all over the world.

Well, unfortunately we do not have many computers in schools here in Pakistan. Even the private schools with larger computer labs rely on old teaching techniques. Students in Pakistan do not use a word processor.

My brother Kamran studied commerce at a local government college. Without attending a single class he was allowed to sit in the exams and he even managed to pass most tests. Now with no real education he is seeking a job. I am helping him find one but I fear that the same will happen to my other younger brother Aazib.

I visited a few computer institutes to check out if any one of them has some practical, real life oriented computer courses. They had courses, a huge list to choose from. But when I talked to the teachers it was quite obvious that they do not have the knowledge. They were not able teach macros, editing and implementing formulas in an spreadsheet and they had no idea how to give a taste of real life problems to their students so that they can be productive with the courses they attend. The sorry state of education in Pakistan.

Any ways, So I decided to teach my brothers on my own. I am going to find out tutorials from the web and design a course for them.

Microsoft Office & Open Office

Word processing
Spreadsheets
Presentations

Corel Draw
Freehand
Adobe photoshop
HTML, XHTML and CSS
Internet crash course

There is one separate course for Kamran.

Financial accounting

This blog is about this learning process. Finding the tutorials, working with them and posting results. I will be posting links to online teach yourself materials, posting the sample documents and initiating a discussion about how we can use Internet as a medium to learn new things and improve our own life and the lives of people around us.